Queer left politics, pop culture and skepticism

About the author

Alex Gabriel is the author of Godlessness in Theory, a blog about religion and how to leave it, popular rhetoric and political dissent, secular, nerd and LGBT cultures, sexuality and gender or whatever else comes to mind. mralexgabriel@me.com; @AlexGabriel.

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EVENTS

A week ago Greta and I held a Google+ hangout to yak about things we like – Buffy, Project Runway, queer politics. Technology, which we’re still trying to believe is our friend, let us down and she ended up being cut off mid rant.

Last night we got back on track and talked gay marriage, atheist tone wars, Oxford commas and So You Think You Can Dance.

We’ll be doing more of these in the near future.

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Andrew Sullivan, godfather of the GGGG movement, has decided it’s time to start ‘Engaging the T’. In his column at the Dish, he doesn’t so much engage with trans activists as engage them like Nelson engaged Spain.

The article, offset with a scrutinising photo of Laverne Cox’s ankles, gets most things wrong. I thought I’d have a go at cutting through the innuendo.

Introduction

There are few topics I feel nervous to write about on this blog, as you might have surmised over the years. But one of them is the question of transgender people.

‘It frightens me that trans people are capable of anger.’

It’s a fascinating topic…

‘Trans rights are an academic thought experiment to me.’

…but remains so completely fraught and riddled with p.c. neurosis that no writer wants to unleash the hounds of furious, touchy trans activism.

‘I want a free pass.’

And that’s the first thing to note here, I’d say. Any minority – especially a tiny one like gays or transgender people – has, at some point, to explain itself to the big, wide world. That’s not entirely fair but it’s unavoidable if you want a change in attitudes or an increase in understanding.

Most people are just completely ignorant, and have never met or engaged a trans person, and so their misconceptions and misunderstandings are inevitable…

‘People can’t be expected to know what they’re talking about.’

…and not self-evidently a matter of bigotry or prejudice.

‘It’s only bigotry if you’re doing it deliberately.’

I think we should be understanding of this, as open as we can be, and answer the kinds of questions some might feel inappropriate or offensive. That’s the basis for dialogue, empathy and progress.

‘Tell me about your genitals.’

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But this has not, alas, been the way in which the transgender movement has largely sought to engage the wider world (with some exceptions). Kevin Williamson notes how Laverne Cox, appearing as a trans person on the cover of Time, nonetheless refused to answer a question about whether she had had her genitals reassigned as too “invasive’.

‘I think trans people are their genitals.’

Sorry, Laverne. But if you’re out there explaining yourself, you’ve gotta explain all of it.

‘You can’t be in magazines and have boundaries.’

And the elaborate and neurotic fixation on language – will writing “transgender” rather than “transgendered” reveal my inner bigot? – is now so neurotic even RuPaul has been cast aside as politically incorrect.

‘Trans women owe men who play dress-up a free pass.’

The insistence that the question of transgender people is essentially the same as that of gay people…

‘What do you mean it’s not a question?’

…when they are quite clearly distinct populations with very different challenges…

And so Kevin Williamson is not wrong, I think, to note the way in which politics has eclipsed the English language here and that language itself has become enmeshed in a rigid ideology:

“The obsession with policing language on the theory that language mystically shapes reality is itself ancient — see the Old Testament — and sympathetic magic proceeds along similar lines, using imitation and related techniques as a means of controlling reality.”

‘I’m trying to distract you from what I just said.’

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But Williamson is just as wrong in his brutal, even callous, denunciation of transgender people as acting out “delusions”.

‘Now you have to give me a free pass.’

And he’s wrong not because he[’s] politically incorrect, but because he’s empirically off-base. He too is creating his own reality. For Williamson, it seems, you can only have one sex and it is dictated by your genitals. End of story. Naturally, he doesn’t address the question of what biological sex is when you are born with indeterminate genitals that are not self-evidently male or female.

The intersex are a small minority – from 0.1 to 1.7 percent, depending on your definition – but in a country of 300 million, that adds up. And the experience of those people – especially those [who] have been genitally mutilated to appear as one sex, while feeling themselves to be the other – is a vital part of understanding what sex and gender are.

Kevin may not like this – but it’s complicated.

‘I see trans people as straight people in the wrong bodies.’

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We can see crucial differences between male and female brains, for example, and they do not always correspond to male and female genitals.

Citation needed.

Since by far the most important sexual organ is the brain, the possibilities of ambiguity are legion.

‘But I still think you binarily just are a man or woman.’

And this is not a matter of pomo language games. The experience of a conflict between self-understood gender and assigned gender is real, and a source of great anguish.

‘Treating trans people as an academic phenomenon is awful when other people do it.’

That human anguish is what we should seek to mitigate, it seems to me, rather than compound as Williamson does.

‘Seriously, where’s my free pass?’

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And as J. Brian Lowder notes, the insistence of many transgendered people on the need to permanently reconcile their physical bodies with their mental states is in some ways a rather conservative impulse.

‘Transitioning makes you straight.’

There’s a reason that Iran’s theocrats allow for sex-change operations but not gay relationships.

‘Trans people aren’t real victims like gay cis men.’

The transgender desire not to be trans-gender but to be one gender physically and mentally is actually quite an affront to queer theorists for whom all gender and sex are social constructions. Many of these people want testosterone and estrogen and surgery to end their divided selves. And it doesn’t get more crudely biological and not-social than that.

‘Now I’m saying genitals do define gender.’

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Which means that there are also divisions within the trans world between those who might be able to pass completely as another gender, after reassignment surgery, and those whose visual ambiguity or androgyny will remain.

‘Trans people just pretend to be the gender they say they are.’

Lowder quotes a trans artist thus:

“If you don’t wish to own [tranny] or any other word used to describe you other than “male” or “female” then I hope you are privileged enough to have been born with an appearance that will allow you to disappear into the passing world or that you or your generous, supportive family are able to afford the procedures which will make it possible for you to pass within the gender binary system you are catering your demands to. If you’re capable of doing that then GO ON AND DISAPPEAR INTO THE PASSING WORLD!

‘I’m arguing for this system and don’t even realise it.’

Coda

This is the perennial question of a minority’s anxiety about sell-outs – whether it be expressed in the fights over how light-skinned some African-Americans are or how “masculine” gay men are or how feminine lesbians appear. In other words, this is a very complicated and sensitive area.

‘I’m pontificating so I don’t have to examine what I’m saying.’

But if we are to make progress in understanding – and William’s piece shows how far we have yet to go – we have to let go of these insecurities and defensiveness and accept that no question about the transgendered is too dumb or too bigoted to answer.

‘Daley will never have a sexual relationship with a woman again,’ Andrew Sullivan had written months before, ‘because his assertion that he still fancies girls is a classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity. I know this because I did it too.’ Gay press outlets, agreeing, waited on tenterhooks for evidence of this – jumping the gun by claiming victory when a quiz show host told the diver ‘You’re a gay man now’ and got this answer.

Assuming bi-identifying men are gay then saying they cast doubt on ‘real bisexuals’ is a common if circular tendency. Teenage boys in particular are often accused, to use Owen Jones’ words in this week’s Guardian, of ‘coming out as bisexual (fuelling a sense of “bi now, gay later”, much to the annoyance of genuine bisexuals), hoping that having one foot in the straight camp might preserve a sense of normality.’

Savage, having written rather often of ‘transitional’ bisexuality in youth, agrees. Discussing his own for Sullivan’s website The Dish, he states that when ‘you meet some somebody who’s fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and they tell you that they’re bi, a little voice in the back of your head goes “Yeah, so was I.” You don’t think that out loud, but you think it. And I don’t think you can help it. And it’s not the fault of bisexuals that you think that, it’s the fault of people who were not bisexuals who said that they were’.

Frightened young gays, we’re told, call themselves bi to escape homophobia, restrained by fear and circumstance from just telling the truth. This isn’t fiction, but nor is it the whole story. While many gay men describe such a past, what was funniest about Daley’s non-statement was how clear a case it was of the opposite pressure – an instance where most bi folk would find accuracy near-impossible.

I’ll let Dan Savage in on a secret here: bisexuals call themselves gay all the time – or at least, allow people to call them gay. It’s often difficult not to. Like several others, Savage claimed Daley’s response to being named a gay man ‘sounded like an “I am”’ (judge for yourself), adding that if the host was wrong, ‘you would think Daley would’ve corrected him’.

While I don’t want to say he definitely is bisexual, it’s easy for me to see why, if so, he didn’t. Correcting people on your sexuality is awkward, especially in a lighthearted context; especially when their mistake (in this case a popular catchphrase) was also a joke; especially on national TV. Providing corrections, details and explanations each time we’re mislabelled can moreover be emotionally exhausting.

Sometimes it’s about hostility. Pseudonymous user TTE reports, ‘When I first came out and all I wanted was the woman I was in love with . . . she and her friends were very keen on letting me know bi women weren’t welcome.’ ‘I clarify that I’m attracted to more than one gender or just tell them I’m bisexual’, Laurel May adds, ‘and prepare to roll my eyes at their biphobia’.

I’ve been called gay by family and friends, on national radio and in nationwide papers. Usually I complain, but not always, and I’m fussier than most bi people I know. Some – mostly men attracted mainly, but not solely, to other men – have switched permanently to the gay label. Statistics tell a similar story. Bisexuals are dramatically more numerous in LGB populations than appearances imply (an outright majority, several studies suggest) because we frequently call ourselves something else.

From 12 to my early years at university, I went with ‘gay’. It wasn’t a lie, or meaningfully ‘wrong’, nor was there a bisexual eureka moment. ‘Gay’ was the way to interpret my attractions that made most sense and felt most useful as a label… until my thoughts changed, and it didn’t. I’ve used nonbinary labels now for several years – most recently, ‘bisexual’ – and as such, gay was to me exactly what bi is called much of the time: a temporary, adolescent bridging phase.

What’s clear to me is that since switching teams, I haven’t regained ‘a sense a normality’; I eminently don’t have ‘one foot in the straight camp’. Being bi four or five years has been emphatically harder than being gay seven or eight – because of all the enmity and erasure above, and because I’ve experienced just as much homophobia. I’m less gay than I was, but no less queer: straight men across the street harassing me have not, for some reason, discovered I’m bisexual and politely quietened down.

When I read authors like Sullivan and Savage say we ‘real bisexuals’ are dismissed because of those people who claim they’re bi for an easier life, I want to say it isn’t all that simple: that being bi is far more difficult for me and countless others than being gay ever was. (I wonder, actually, if some drop the pretence partly because it no longer seems worth it.) And then I want to tell them two can play at that game.

We know that ‘true’ bisexuals are extremely numerous – at least as much so as gay men – however many ‘fakes’ there are. How does Savage presume to tell who is and isn’t an impostor, and who made him the judge to start with? The truth is denialism doesn’t discriminate: it’s used against everyone who says they’re bi, especially among young men. If gay and straight teenagers can be believed, why can’t bisexual ones?

Yes, gay men sometimes call themselves bi – but systematically, at least as many bi people call themselves gay. Per Savage’s logic, it would be totally valid for us to treat gays, teenage and otherwise, as bisexuals in disguise; to feel a pressing, overpowering need to question the identity or truthfulness of those we meet, telling them ‘So were we, at that age’; ‘This is classic bridge-building’; ‘We know, because we did it too.’

I don’t get that urge, because I’m capable of seeing my narrative isn’t everyone’s – of detaching my experience from any given stranger’s. Also, because I don’t know their inner thoughts better than they do. Also, because when people express preferences about how their sexuality is labelled (the same as ones about their name or pronouns), respecting them is just effing polite.

I consulted dozens of bi people for this post; I know and interact with dozens more; I’ve read and followed the work of still dozens more for years. I’ve yet to encounter the anger ‘genuine bisexuals’ feel, according to gay men, at those who borrow our label because it helps them feel safe. Being constantly expected to prove it legitimate ourselves, often resorting to using other ones, we’re unlikely as a community to want anybody stripped of labels (pretend or not) that help them through the night.

As Marius Pieterse says, there’s ‘Nothing wrong with stopping over in bi-town on the way to gayville. Many stop over on the way back too. More still stay.’ Tourists from gayville and straightbury alike, indeed, can regularly be found visiting. All are welcome: mistrust of our identity is fuelled by biphobia, not by this, and gay men who propagate it, Savage included, should take responsibility.

If you’re unable to recognise that other queer lives may not mirror yours; if you can’t take people at their word on things that only they can know about; if you can’t avoid treating them like they need to prove to you their sexuality is what they say – all favours bi people do gay people – this is your fault. The problem isn’t ‘fake bisexuals’ casting doubt on them: your doubt is your choice, and the problem is you.

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Not many know gay marriage is a legacy of AIDS. Attempts by same-sex couples at the turn of the nineties to have partnerships legally recognised – in Denmark, New York, Hawaii – were prompted, in the words of the New York Times, by an epidemic that ‘brought questions of inheritance and death benefits to many people’s minds’. The argument gained ground, in fact, that pushing institutions of monogamy would stem the flow of HIV. ‘[I]n the wake of AIDS’, Andrew Sullivan wrote in the New Republic, it would ‘qualify as a genuine public health measure. Those conservatives who deplore promiscuity among some homosexuals should be among the first to support it.’

On calling gay marriage reactionary and citing this in evidence, I’ve been accused of gravedigging – unearthing arguments now twenty-five years old and foisting them anachronistically on current debates, regardless of historical context. But Sullivan’s logic never went away: it’s led to his acknowledgement inU.S. media as the contemporary gay agenda’s author, and is visible today all over moves for marriage reform.

‘LGBT history will be made’, the Advocatereported only yesterday, ‘on January 1, 2014, when a same-sex wedding takes place atop the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s float during the 125th Rose Parade[.]

‘The wedding between Aubrey Loots and Danny Leclair, both gay men from Los Angeles, will be a first for the Rose Parade. The couple’s display of their love and commitment to one another invokes the parade’s 2014 theme, “Dreams Come True,” as well as the theme of the AHF’s float entry, “Love is the Best Protection,” which aims to celebrate same-sex marriage and the role it can play in helping to reduce new HIV infections among gay men. The Foundation’s float will be designed to resemble a wedding cake, with each couple tying the knot atop the float as living cake-toppers.’

Setting aside this terrifying image, suggesting as it does some hideous gay version of the Hunger Games – ‘the best protection’? Really?

‘Love’ doesn’t equal the promise of monogamy; to say so is in the first place a fool’s errand, and an unkind one at that. But neither protects against transmission anyway. How have Catholic doctrines of sex within marriage worked out in countries with HIV-AIDS epidemics? How did chastity work out for those infected by a loved and trusted partner? How did vilifying ‘promiscuity among some homosexuals’, painting AIDS as the fruit of sexual immorality, work out for Catholic Sullivan himself, found posting Craigslist ads in 2001 for unprotected anal sex with ‘other HIV-positive men’? If he couldn’t practise what he preached, why take for granted lesser mortals will?

That spouses play around, with or without permission, isn’t news. Expecting they won’t amounts to abstinence-based disease prevention, which the AHF need only turn on the news to see in action. If not out of deeply conservative sexual ethics, why expect us all to swear monogamy anyway, when prophylactics infinitely more effective exist? Public health is guarded best by public measures, not the pretence of private virtue – in this case, access to condoms, sex education and healthcare and funds for medical research. And are those who do want to make vows prevented by not having them state-recognised? Does monogamy’s achievability depend somehow on access to a civil register?

In a Telegraph column this May that replicated almost exactly Sullivan’s original case, claiming ‘marriage acts as a “commitment device”, encouraging fidelity and discouraging high-risk behaviour’, David Skelton tacked on perhaps the most bizarre argument yet: that ‘[b]y making clear that gay people are fully equal members of society, equal marriage could also help to reduce the level of alienation felt by some young gay people’ – thus, presumably, quash their pursuit of risky activities as a contrived form of self-harm.

Neil Giuliano of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation claimed much the same in the Huffington Post a month later, writing ‘When we promote and permit intolerance through bans on same-sex marriage, we enable and encourage feelings of marginalization, depression and isolation among gay people – particularly LGBT youth. As a result, things like substance use, alcohol consumption, and sexual risk taking increase. And we cannot ignore the data: these activities lead to more cases of HIV.

‘On the flip side, when we promote tolerance through marriage equality, we bring people in from the margins, we help them to feel more affirmed and connected, and risk taking decreases. When this happens, HIV infection rates also decrease.’

What data does Giuliano cite so ostentatiously? A study from 2009 at Emory University suggesting, in his words and its authors’, that constitutional bans on gay marriage in U.S. states ‘raise the infection rate by four cases per 100,000 people’. Without, admittedly, having viewed the paper in detail, the nationwide infection rate according to Wikipedia is 0.6 percent, meaning the rise in question would push numbers from 600 per 100,000 to – wait for it – 604.

A fringe subculture of deliberate infection does exist, but the impression’s hard to avoid that Skelton and Giuliano are reaching opportunistically for any way to praise gay marriage, no matter how baseless or co-optative. According to government figures from 2010, UK diagnoses more than doubled between 1995 and 2009. This period saw Britain’s age of consent equalised, Section 28 scrapped and civil partnerships introduced, greater media visibility for LGBT people and falls in the prevalence of homophobic attitudes, all uncontroversially steps toward ‘bring[ing] people in from the margins’. If none of them stifled HIV transmission, why would marriage reform today? Persuading oneself it’ll solve a slew of other problems is a nice way of making the workload appear smaller while taking no material action.

We’ve no cause assume a vague, immeasurable sea change in the LGBT psyche will emerge mysteriously from the legal right to wed and magic HIV away. We’ve good cause to assume it won’t. Things that may actually help aren’t just condoms and clean needles, sex ed, med research and so on, vital as those are; they’re housing, healthcare and community support for those who fall into sex work, self-harm, drug use or homelessness, services Britain’s government cuts to the bone while commending itself for legalising gay.

A gay rights lobby that applauds it and others like it is one thing – but claiming cynically while doing so that marriage holds the key to HIV prevention is a fiction adding insult to infection.

There is no one listed here I don’t respect and admire enormously – and for that reason, I’m scared to publish this post: scared what I’m about to write will be misread, or provoke a fiery, personal, heat-of-the-moment reaction; scared that it won’t be taken how I intend, as a constructive contribution rather than a joyless sneer or an attack on the elation friends are currently feeling; scared, ultimately, that it’ll alienate me from people whose opinions I care about, whom I regard tremendously highly.

I’m more scared of their responses and other readers’, actually, than I was of upsetting the friends whose wedding I recounted a week ago. This post is almost as much to do with marriage as that one, because the way DOMA’s semi-dismantling has been framed bothers me; more specifically, it troubles me as a queer atheist how much of the skeptical community (though far from unaccompanied in this) has framed the broader gay marriage narrative primarily as one of (pro-)LGBTQ secularism versus religious conservatism.

Some examples. (Again, these are all people I look up to, whose work and writing I support and will continue to support – I’m exemplifying here for clarity, but I don’t mean anyone to feel personally targeted. I’m resolutely not throwing anyone under the bus, nor hoping to be thrown under myself.)

Without the protection of federal law, my wedding ring just evaporated off my finger. The Christians tried to warn us, people! #DOMA

DOMA was a stupid, reactionary, medieval law. I’m glad the U.S. is rid of it. But the reason we (or rather, Americans) are rid of it is not that it was theocratic. Yes, the ideals encoded about queer relationships’ inferiority and the nature of marriage have been transmitted by religions extensively, and religion’s cultural footprints enabled DOMA as much as actual religious structures and beliefs; but DOMA, despite the extent of its religious support, was never a religious law as such, or in any rigid sense a breach of church-state separation.

Much more importantly, the rhetoric its opposition employed beyond the skeptical community was never primarily secularist: the language of gay marriage campaigns in the last decade is characterised much more by references to love, equality, progress, rights than by outright rejection of God in the public sphere. My region of queer politics, as will be central to this post, is generally averse to any marriages’ state recognition, and some arguments for this have hinged on separating church and state, among them Betsy Brown’s in ‘A Radical Dyke Experiment for the Next Century’. While I don’t wholly subscribe to her argument, I do maintain there’s slippage between secularism and support for contemporary gay marriage campaigns; the twain need not meet, and haven’t in most gay marriage advocacy.

The discourse we build around this issue matters greatly, just as it has for every other queer or trans* issue. Our sexes and genders, our sexual identities, the closets in which we’re placed by parents and teachers, our legal rights and our standing as equal beings or perverted sinners are products of language we use and narratives we spin: the history of queerness is one of representations, and the way we represent recent moves around gay marriage will shape future realities of queer activism, as representations of Stonewall shape today’s. I think the discourse being built here around DOMA and gay marriage risks appropriation, erasure and historical amnesia – actually, while I empathise with all forms of hostility to America’s religious right, I worry it already demonstrates them.

Framing DOMA’s neutering as a secular(ist) triumph invites us to view the prior conflict principally as a secular-religious one, where homophobic religious conviction fuelled U.S. law reform to forbid gay marriage, and LGBT populations pressed for gay marriage as an anti-theocratic project; it suggests religious belief to be the first cause in this progress of events, and gay marriage advocacy to have spawned in reaction. This runs counter mainstream gay marriage rhetoric employed in recent years, as detailed above, and I’d argue moreover that it inverts the historical truth. DOMA was not directly produced by religious belief or tradition in 1996, as religion tends directly to spawn, say, ideas of XX and XY bodies’ superior sexual complementarity. Rather, it was itself a reaction – after the fact – to contemporary shifts in queer politics toward the ideal of gay marriage, which owed little to secularism and much to AIDS.

To narrate the gay marriage project’s history before all else as a tale of secular(ist) LGBT folk battling religious rightists misrepresents the dialectic which gave birth to it, and had precious little to do with religion. Internal queer tensions in the years before DOMA, not theocratic heterosexism, were what first pushed marriage onto the gay agenda. If we want consider ensuing developments in the next two decades clearly, and avoid homogenising LGBTQ communities when we discuss gay marriage, I don’t think we can lose sight of those tensions.

Religious bodies at large prior to the late eighties only passively opposed gay marriage, because gay marriage had yet to become a solidified concept. What currency the idea gained during the nineties can be traced back to Andrew Sullivan, a gay conservative who in 1989, two years prior to becoming its editor, authored a column for The New Republic entitled ‘Here Comes the Groom’. His central argument, still instructive reading, proceeds as follows:

Let’s take a moment, in case its sheer vomit-inducing nerve eludes you, to parse this genesis of contemporary gay marriage efforts.

Legalizing gay marriage would offer homosexuals the same deal society now offers heterosexuals: general social approval and specific legal advantages in exchange for a deeper and harder-to-extract- yourself-from commitment to another human being.

‘Including queer people in state marriage would give them everything straight people have – and why would anyone want anything else (or, God forbid, anything more)? – as long as they didn’t do anything socially unacceptable, of course, and earned the right to things like medicine and financial aid by giving up sexual autonomy for the rest of their lives.’

Like straight marriage, it would foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence.

‘Like straight marriage, it would make abusive domestic situations harder to escape and help keep poor people in their place – actually, it’s a really great excuse not to have a functional welfare system.’

Since there’s no reason gays should not be allowed to adopt or be foster parents, it could also help nurture children.

‘There’s no reason gays should not be allowed to adopt or be foster parents – only the married ones, though, obviously.’

And its introduction would not be some sort of radical break with social custom.

‘Far be it from beleaguered minorities to challenge mainstream customs – it’s not like anyone needs wide-ranging social change, is it?’

As it has become more acceptable for gay people to acknowledge their loves publicly, more and more have committed themselves to one another for life in full view of their families and their friends.

‘…what do you mean, “provide the data”? Look, everyone knows more people pledging lifelong monogamy to one another is a good thing – it must be, that’s what straight people have always done (and hey, it always works out for them). Let’s make sure only those people get basic citizenship rights and social support, and throw in some unfair privileges. People who don’t want to “commit” just deserve less.’

A law institutionalizing gay marriage would merely reinforce a healthy social trend.

‘A law institutionalising gay marriage would merely reinforce what I’m claiming is a social trend. Which, again, must be a good thing.’

It would also, in the wake of AIDS, qualify as a genuine public health measure.

‘Well, no one ever gets HIV from a monogamous partner! And married people, naturally, are always totally monogamous.’

Those conservatives who deplore promiscuity among some homosexuals should be among the first to support it.

‘It’s one thing being gay, isn’t it – I should know – but actually having more gay sex than strictly necessary or normal?! That’s the secret to solving all this AIDS malarkey, you know. Forget sex education, provision of condoms and clean needles or funding research for new treatments, we just need good, old fashioned sexual morality to stop people fornicating; same kind the Catholics go in for, and it’s never caused them any trouble!’

‘Since AIDS’, Sullivan wrote, ‘to be gay and to be responsible has become a necessity.’ Gay people needed marriage, in his view, as a mass form of prophylaxis: mere use of condoms and clear dialogue, of course, wasn’t an option – and in any case, was much less responsible than lifelong monogamy. These are the hyperconservative roots of queer liberalism’s cause célèbre, and to a great extent the secular community’s. Yes, right wing Puritanism birthed today’s gay marriage movement, but not the theocratic kind; portraying that movement as a secularist one, defending queer citizens from religious homophobia’s fiery breath like St. George and his dragon-afflicted maiden, ignores the fact the bigotry which prompted it began within the queer populace, elite, class-privileged media figures selling sex workers, polyamorous lovers and HIV positive people down the river; it conceals the uncomfortable truth that in this story, damsel and dragon were one and the same.

No doubt Sullivan’s willingness to sell out his own ostensible community earned him the stature he used to that end – at the height of the AIDS crisis, it seems hard to imagine any out journalist but a reactionary one becoming editor of TNR. As it turned out, he cared neither for monogamy nor for condom use; as Richard Goldstein described the debacle twelve years ago in The Village Voice,

Using the screen name RawMuscleGlutes, Sullivan posted on a site for bare backers (the heroic term for gay men who have sex without condoms). He was seeking partners for unsafe anal and oral intercourse. Sullivan revealed that he was HIV-positive and stated his preference for men who are “poz,” but he also indicated an interest in “bi scenes,” groups, parties, orgies, and “gang bangs.” This hardly fit the gay ideal Sullivan had created in his book Virtually Normal. In fact, RawMuscleGlutes is just the sort of “pathological” creature who raises Sullivan’s wrath. Hypocrisy has always been a rationale for outing, and it’s the justification for a group of gay journalists who teamed up with the tabs to expose him.

Some would call this character assassination, though one can’t help feeling it seems more an assisted suicide.

That Sullivan’s case for gay marriage (that is, the original case) was as regressive as it was needn’t mean, of course, that no valid case exists. But the fact the gay marriage project started out so divisively and oppressively has consequences: given its weaponisation so early on against the queer population’s most vulnerable members, it’s impossible to claim it unambiguously for that populace as a whole. Treating pursuit of gay marriage as the central or quintessential queer struggle homogenises us; it suggests it to be an aim equally representative of or accessible to everyone outside the cishet mainstream, when its history has alienated those from day one who lie furthest from it. To gloss the partial repeal of DOMA as a ubiquitous one-size-fits-all gay rights victory ignores that the campaign for it, whatever view we take of the end goal, always fit some of us better than others.

To claim it as a victory by (mostly straight) secularists on behalf of the queer population, to use support for gay marriage as a metric of queer-friendliness, to locate it as the pinnacle or culmination of all past queer activism – risks erasing everybody alienated from or othered by the project’s history, and obscures the sheer sectionality of the last twenty years’ campaigns. It means using figures like Sullivan and those not driven away from gay marriage politics by their influence as a barometer of the queer population’s priorities and desires, and not their victims, or the many marginalised queer people for whom poverty, the closet or the fear of violence will make marriage a pipe dream even post-legalisation.

One cannot legitimately claim the erosion of DOMA, or any ultimate achievement of complete marriage reform, as an equal victory for both these sides. Framing them as secularist, (pro-)LGBTQ victories against religious homophobia, beyond being out of touch with mainstream gay marriage rhetoric past and present, whitewashes over the cracks, painting the queer population as a singular, happy whole and not the fractured hierarchical wreck it really is. Presenting that whole populace as equally happy and liberated means presenting it in the image of the most privileged; the greatest conflict around gay marriage rages not between queer and religious populations, but within the former, as it always has.

None of thus in itself means gay marriage is a bad idea, or that no one should pursue it. But while we’re told scrapping DOMA marks the fulfilment of historical queer activism, with figures like Harvey Milk and events like Stonewall hauled out to suggest a long, hard fight for justice led by ordinary queer people, the truth is that grassroots struggle never occurred – and it shows. What victories are achieved won’t now be equal victories for us all – not for Sullivan’s HIV positive pariahs, not for trans* people told by the HRC to take down their pride flag or LGBTQs made to hide their immigration status; not for polyamorous people deemed ‘irresponsible’ from the very beginning, othered when activists and politicians insist gay marriage won’t lead to polygamy, so there’s no need to worry; likewise not for people interested in their relatives, who we’re assured won’t gain marriage rights themselves, the disgusting incestuous perverts; not for kink communities expelled from queer spaces and events through bans on nudity; not for those of us unconvinced of the military’s heroism. For thousands of people, the gay marriage project’s ultimate achievements, whatever they are, can now only be mitigated triumphs – celebrated, at best, despite the cost at which they came.

Brendan O’Neill is a homophobe with homophobic intent – one quotes him at one’s peril – but a contrarian stopped clock is right twice a day, and when he says gay marriage campaigns are nothing like the Civil Rights Movement, he has a point (as any such indiscriminate hurler of reactionary silage occasionally will, if only be accident):

In order for gay marriage to become one of the most celebrated issues of our time, embraced by everyone from David Cameron to The Times to Goldman Sachs, nobody had to fight on the streets; nobody had to organise long and bitter boycotts of public institutions; nobody was water-cannoned by the authorities, attacked by police dogs, burnt out of their homes.

When bricks were thrown at Stonewall and San Francisco burned on White Night, gay marriage was not on the agenda; until the nineties, the concept barely registered on anyone’s agenda. Its passage into popular awareness and LGBT political centrality was triggered in the early noughties not by marches, riots, sit-ins or public meetings but by the celebrity lawyer Evan Wolfson’s establishment of Freedom to Marry, an elite lobby group powered by a multimillion dollar endowment. If Sullivan was the architect of contemporary gay marriage politics, Wolfson oversaw its construction; both are now heralded, instructively, as ‘fathers’ of the current gay agenda, and their role in setting it – alongside politicians, NGOs and the liberal media – illustrates perfectly that this has been a top-down project for the most part, fostered and promoted by elite, comparatively privileged LGBT ‘leaders’ and their straight allies, trickling down into everyday queer consciousness and subjectivity as the fortunes of the untaxed rich are claimed to trickle, much more than it was ever advocated from the ground up.

None of this, once again, means it’s a bad idea by definition. But there are those of who think, incidentally, that it is; that inclusion in a legal structure like marriage is regressive and misguided, that assimilation is not liberation, that the state is not the solution – that serious reform and social change are needed, not just a reconfigured status quo. I’m not going to argue for that here and now; my point is, the argument has never really been had. Presenting DOMA’s half-haulage as a development welcomed universally by the queer population – or, moreover, as a secular(ist) LGBT coup against the religious right – obscures and erases the history of gay marriage. There has never, in fact, been a sufficiently serious, grassroots internal dialogue about its value as a goal.

Last year in the secular community, it came to light that numerous prominent women had been harassed at conferences. They shared and compared experiences, considering the available responses and reported what had happened to their readers and our broader community; eventually, this led to a coordinated effort for codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies at skeptical events, and for the most part it was successful: a plurality of well known conferences established clear, considered policies and took other measures to prevent harassment. This is exactly how social movements progress at their best – initiated and steered by the people most strongly affected, self-reflective and thoughtful about which course of action should be taken; it used shared discourse and collaborative dialogue to identify the problems, examine them and reach practical conclusions, which afterward were implemented.

And this is precisely not how gay marriage was popularised, dreamt up by those atop the social food chain and handed down via lobbying efforts, politicians (often straight ones) and the liberal media. There was never an internal consultation period, when queer communities at large reflected on the idea, assessed its pros and cons and declared it, in conclusion, worthy of treatment as the flagship LGBT initiative. If you think there was, when was it?

Yes, DOMA was a response to a smattering of queer attempts at legal marriage in the early nineties – in Hawaii, principally – and to Denmark’s introduction of basic civil unions a few years before; but it was just as much a Republican fortification against the ‘normalising’ rhetoric of high-up figures like Sullivan. Those first civil unions, too, were far more a pragmatic response to the threat of partner death and destitution in the height of the AIDS crisis than a political expression, and certainly not one of secularism. Certainly, after Freedom to Love’s emergence in the early noughties, gay marriage’s grip on queer media narratives slid unencumbered into place, a meme spread with the marketing guile of progressive think tanks, the commentariat and the gay elite – such that supporting it became a presumption. As an adolescent, back when I still identified as gay, I grew up presumptively supporting marriage reform; not because I’d weighed the costs and benefits to reach a prognosis – I hadn’t – but because gay people wanted that, and if I was gay, I must want it too.

I believe today that most straight ‘allies’ support gay marriage because it seems the obvious expression of queer-friendly solidarity they wish to display, and not because they’ve examined the queer arguments for and against it on its own terms. It’s an attempt at allyship, ironically, which erases thousands of queer people, including me, who are skeptical of assimilation and of propping up state marriage, along with significant parts of our history and politics which criticise the gay marriage project from the queer left. It’s by no means absurd to imagine Harvey Milk, if abstracted to the present day, might be more on our side than Sullivan’s and Wolfson’s.

Like most queer people with earnest reservations about it, I think the debate amongst ourselves we never had about gay marriage is one we desperately need to have, and should have had before large-scale legal changes were underway. Again, this post isn’t the time place to stage that debate, but there are those of us who see as empowering conservative agendas on healthcare, welfare and immigration among others (I see this above, in Andrew Sullivan’s original proposal; I see it around me in David Cameron’s marriagerhetoric). There are those of us who find state marriage discriminatory, oppressive and unjust whoever has access to it, and those of us who think the state has no more right to rule on whose relationships (or families) are valid than does religion. Even if we accept government to be legitimately democratic, why ought our relationship choices be up for debate?

You don’t have to agree with any of this, at least straight away. It took me a long period of careful thinking to arrive at the position I now hold, thanks largely to the culture of crappy discourse, mentioned above, in which I grew up. In media and political narratives, queer critiques of structures like marriage to which LGBT activism now aspires are marginalised, ignored and left out of discussion.

We contribute to this whenever we use support for gay marriage as a litmus test for queer-friendliness; when we presuppose all critics of it to be right wing bigots, or especially to be religious; when we devote whole reams of coverage to the same familiar, reactionary right wing arguments against marriage reform but only the scantest reportage (or none at all) to the dissenting queer left’s; most of all, when we allow the marriage debate to be straight-led and straight–dominated.

Again and again, I’ve watched whole public rallies for gay marriage where straight politicians and mostly-straight crowds cheered for progress, love, acceptance, equality – seen current affairs programmes where all-straight panels debated the merits of ‘equal marriage’, read pages and pages of straight journalists’ applause for ‘gay rights’ measures I and many others, as queer people, find deeply worrying. Much of the time the secular community, though far from unique in this, feels the same way. It’s enough to lend new credence to the phrase ‘to the exclusion of all others’ – particularly when the conflict over marriage is framed discreetly and sans nuance as a pitched battle between The Gays and Evil Christian Bigots. Yes, they’re often pretty evil; yes, their bigotry is often religiously fuelled – but why they getting more airtime and acknowledgement than folk like me are?

The queer agenda, on marriage or anything else, needs to be set by us – not by our well-meaning straight ‘allies’, and certainly not by homophobic theocrats – and I believe this culture of erasure is inhibiting that. It’s harming our ability, as a social movement, to be self-critical, to evaluate our goals more carefully, and also to be self-theorising – not just to pursue automatically and reactively whatever it is homophobes want to deny us, letting their bigotry dictate our actions, but to generate ideas, ideals and ideologies of our own for queer liberation, on our own terms, for ourselves and for a better society.

If you’re a gay marriage supporter, then, active in secular or atheist circles or a straight ally, think carefully about the discourse you promote.

You don’t have to be on my side in this issue. Many people aren’t, queer and straight alike, and I appreciate a multitude of voices even though I think they’re wrong. But please, let voices like mine and those I’ll link to beneath this post join in that multitude; in the argument over marriage reform and LGBTQ people’s future, please give us a seat at the table. Our arguments aren’t for everyone, but nor are they trivial. They deserve to be acknowledged and properly considered, and to be part of the mainstream (secular) discourse from which they’re so often excluded.

If you define the current gay marriage wars uncomplicatedly as conflicts between heroic, secular(ist) LGBT couples seeking marriage and villainous religious conservatives, you are homogenising a whole population, and in doing so erasing a great many of its members and much of its political thought from a discourse which badly needs their contributions. You are contributing to a mass culture of that homogenising erasure.

If you represent gay marriage’s critics as by definition religious, including by saying or implying no secular criticisms exist (they do – see below!), you are doing the same – and by representing the conflict as predominantly secularist-theocratic, you are expunging from the record all the oppressive, repressive, regressive actions taken historically by gay marriage advocates against other queer and trans* people, motivated far less by secularism than by deeply puritanical, reactionary conservatism.

If you’re a straight ally, and you treat support for gay marriage as a component of ally-ship to be taken for granted, you might well similarly be erasing and ignoring thousands of members of the population whose rights you claim to advocate – and you’re in danger of upholding a status quo where the primary movers for and representatives of LGBTQ people are often straight people; where LGBT activism’s goals and queer activism’s context are dictated more by straight people than LGBTQ people. However much you oppose our stances, we’re still part of this, and shouldn’t be expunged from queer history – no more than anarchist feminists like Emma Goldman who opposed women’s votes, or the homophile Mattachine Society, whose members covered the battered Stonewall Inn with pamphlets demanding the riots ceased.

So here’s where I ask you to do something positive.

If you haven’t encountered the strands of queer politics and argument I’m discussing here before, especially around marriage reform, read at least a few of the pieces I’m linking below, if not all of them. Whatever your conclusion, think carefully about the arguments raised; use them to inform your broader thinking on LGBTQ issues; be willing to re-examine positions you hold, and relinquish some of your assumptions, before you reach a stance you feel you can solidly justify. (In short, be a good skeptic.)

If you find them hard to follow, or you don’t have the time or energy to put into reading them, feel free to talk to me or others about the relevant discussions. (This being said, these topics matter, so particularly if you’re someone with an influential voice – a prominent writer or speaker, a straight ally or activist, or someone who discusses gay marriage a lot – be prepared to invest time and energy in raising your awareness where it needs raising.

If you’re a gay marriage supporter, including after considering the queer critiques on offer, stop presenting that support as being a de facto part of (pro-)LGBTQ existence, and acknowledge the internal critiques of gay marriage when you talk about. Criticise the criticisms as much as you like, but remember to make them part of the discussion. This goes doubly if you’re writing a one of the familiar ‘Worst arguments against gay marriage’ articles – instead of just hauling out the typical right wing homophobia, think more critically about the arguments made for gay marriage, plenty of which are just as terrible and equally offensive.

And if you see people making bad arguments for it, conflating being (pro-)LGBTQ necessarily with gay marriage support, conflating criticism of it with bigoted religious conservatism or rewriting history, tell them to stop. Or, better still, link them to this.